Things I Don't Understand: Words which aren’t themselves

Wednesday 13 March 2013

Words which aren’t themselves

Some words simply aren’t the things that they are describing, for example:

An adjective is a noun.

A letter is a word

Palindrome backwards is emordnilap

An oxymoron does not contradict itself (unless it actually means bull-like idiot)

Unusual is a very common word

A well know word to most English speakers is unfamiliar

A pillow is a rather sharp word, why each letter could easily take your eye out, except maybe the “o” I would happily sleep on that

Native is an immigrant to this language from Latin

A door is occasionally a jar

Breakeven will not divide equally

One word is not one word (then maybe it shouldn’t be on this list of one words)

Smelly doesn’t smell

Abbreviation is a long word

If random was random it would be spelt rd42yfghj

However turn of phrase is a turn of phrase.

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Introduction

(or is it preface, or forward, or prologue -no, wait that’s novels, like epilogue, it probably doesn’t matter, I think they’re all the same so I’ll just combine them all together:)

Preprointroforwardlogueface.

When reading this list in the future please don’t see me as the clever dashing, handsome, successful, famous knighted billionaire with twelve Oscars and four Nobel prizes that I am (no pressure future self (Oh! This is cool I’m talking to my future self! Ok, um...has the time machine been invented yet? If it has come back in time and tell me. Do you see this era now as I see the seventies now (really crap)? Oh, and has everything become even more outrageous (like now compared with a hundred years ago or so in terms of public swearing nudity and stuff like that)? Has Cliff Richard died yet? Has Walt Disney’s head been unfrozen? Are all televisions in 3d without glasses, or has the hype died down like I predicted it would as what happened in the fifties? Have bracket this big with other brackets in and double brackets been legalised?)) but, as the lazy teenager that I was, somewhere in the middle of nowhere (Scotland) dying of boredom, writing rubbish because when a teacher comes into my room it looks vaguely like prep or revision, both of which should be abolished. See me as a man stuck in the age of the teens, that obscene time when it’s not worth doing if it has no point to it, unless I say it doesn’t have a point and then I have cause to do it. Floating in this absurd decade where pop culture references don’t work any more but we don’t have a future to think of because it will be eaten by SUVs (or something, I fell asleep when he said “inconvenient”) and when a song will only sell well if it features “Lil Wayne”. But anyway, this is a list of stuff that I just don’t get and that you shouldn’t either. But a word of warning, please don’t take me seriously...(or do if you’re taking this really seriously)....(which I am)....(no, seriously: life or death)....